Opening at the TA T in November 2022, DAOULA – SHEEN focuses on the natural formation and cultural history of wild silk obtained from caterpillars in West Africa and the multifaceted view of this unique material by microbiologists, material scientists, and architects from Germany.
DAOULA – SHEEN is a project of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by the DFG.
Curated by Laurence Douny, Karin Krauthausen, and Felix Sattler with a film installation by Thabo Thindi.
1st HZK-CARMAH Colloquium in winter semester 22/23
14 November 2022, 2 p.m. right on time.
The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).
How can science be curated? What (new) museum concepts and practices are needed for exhibiting academic collections and research as well as scientific processes and activities? Three recent science exhibitions and museums are the focus of the previous day: the FORUM FOR SCIENCE, ART AND DOUBT of the Ghent University Museum (open since 2020), the first show “After Nature” of the HUMBOLDT LABORATORY in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum (2021) and the basic exhibition of the Göttingen FORUM WISSEN (2022). What they have in common is the curatorial concern to show science in the making, i.e. the process of knowledge production, and to provide a glimpse behind the scenes to show how scientists research and work. On the one hand, it asks how such processes are (or can be) exhibited and what tensions arise in relation to representative claims. On the other hand, it will be examined which understanding of science is being exposed and which museum concept is being tested.
Dr Daniela Döring is a cultural scientist and post-doctoral researcher at the research college “Wissen | Ausstellen” at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She previously held academic, curatorial and teaching positions at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, the Braunschweig Centre for Gender Studies and the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam. In her research, she interweaves curatorial practice and academic discourse, focusing on science exhibitions, diversity and gender in museums, body and gender history, and cultural techniques of surveying and datafication.
An exhibition of painting students of weißensee kunsthochschule berlin under the direction of Prof. Pia Linz and Petra Trenkel. Curated by the Kleine Humboldt Galerie.
Runtime: 10.09.2022 bis 01.01.2023
Location: ZAK – Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst auf der Zitadelle Spandau
The big city has long been considered a center of the avant-garde and a constant source of inspiration for artists. Its appeal is fed by extremes: Berlin as the epitome of coolness, recklessness and freedom. Living in a big city offers distraction and full days. However, the impressiveness of Berlin’s size and speed can also cause instability or insecurity. In addition to its sheer size, Berlin stands out for its diversity, expressed in its many smaller city centers, diverse population, and never-ending streets.
For one semester, students in Prof. Pia Linz’s and Petra Trenkel’s group at the Weissensee School of Art intensively explored precisely this multifaceted richness of the big city. Through excursions and guest lectures, they sharpened their view of the city and reflected the impressions and observations gained in their works. The resulting group exhibition at ZAK – Center for Contemporary Art was curated by the student initiative Kleine Humboldt Galerie.
The exhibition BIG CITY BABY now brings the big city into the small city, the Zitadelle in Spandau. In the sensitive interplay of the works, one experiences the city through the eyes of the young Berlin artists. Visual reflections on urban life grow here in various disciplines, are linked with other thematic areas and sometimes exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Thus, not only formal experiments are realized in the works, but also a wide range of themes – some of them autobiographically tinged – are touched upon and examined: Youthfulness in the city; the metropolitan area as an excessive demand as well as a place of retreat; the city as a home for the (self-chosen) family; exploration of urban nature and vacancy, et cetera.
The slogan-like title BIG CITY BABY offers space for the multitude of positions of this exhibition. It has no fixed meaning and yet everyone knows what is meant. It is not a quotation, but one nevertheless thinks to have heard it somewhere before. From a passing convertible on the Kudamm or at night on the subway track. BIG CITYBABY is a shout, a whisper, a vibe. You understand it, or you don’t. You can’t escape BIG CITY BABY, just like you can’t escape the big city.
Lars Unkenholz: It’s you I’m thinking of, 2022, Öl auf Leinwand, 170×140 cm
Book presentation to celebrate the publication of Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities.
Looking at diverse trajectories of people and things, the volume examines developments in various parts of Europe, including France, Germany, Russia, Turkey and the Balkans. We will discuss entanglements between heritage, Islam and Europe and ways in which these entanglements have played out against the backdrop of recent developments, such as debates on restitution, decolonising museums or the ‘refugee crisis’.
The roundtable discussion will include inputs from Wendy Shaw, Peter McMurray, Jesko Schmoller, Avi Astor, Diletta Guidi, Banu Karaca, Mirjam Brusius, Christine Gerbich and Rikke Gram, and the editors, Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald and Mirjam Shatanawi.
The event will take place in the framework of the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik / CARMAH Colloquium Series.
The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).
Since the 1990s, collecting practices and associated problems such as contamination and toxicity have increasingly come into focus due to the growing ecological and political relevance of objects and materials. However, little epistemic relevance has been attributed to the toxic remains produced during these transformative processes of differentiation, purification and reevaluation.
The presentation provides insight into the process of an artistic research that deals with this marginality by means of asbestos-contaminated objects of a foundation collection and their handling.
Flavia Caviezel is an ethnologist, film scholar and lecturer at the FHNW – Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Institut Experimentelles Design und Medienkulturen in Basel. The work was produced during a research residency 2021-22 at the Matters of Activity cluster at Humboldt University.
The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).
Museum Space Knowledge. An Interdisciplinary and Co-laborative Experiment at Humboldt Labor
The exhibition spaces of the Humboldt Laboratory in the Humboldt Forum are conceived as an instrument of knowledge transfer between science and society. The research project “Museum Raum Wissen” (Museum Space Knowledge), funded by the Joachim Herz Foundation, examines this transfer from a spatial perspective in an intersectional way. The aim is to produce insights into the space and architecture of the co-production of knowledge in the museum context and to develop impulses for the design of exhibition spaces. To this end, a ‘co-laborative’ field research at the interface between architecture and social sciences will be carried out in the opening exhibition “Nach der Natur”.
Sarah Etz and Séverine Marguin provide insights into the ongoing project and initial results.
The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).
The DFG-funded research project „Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts“ deals with the question of how digital images transform the museum experience. Two interconnected empirical studies explore these transformations ethnographically. The first study takes a close look at how digital images from museum databases are downloaded, shared, and dealt with in people’s everyday lives. The second study concentrates on digital image practices in the physical museum and seeks to understand how visitor-photographs taken in museums are curated and contextualized on social media platforms. An eye-tracking study furthermore gives interesting insights on how interdisciplinary collaboration with information science can enhance ethnography and shows how the human eye plays into curatorial practice processes.
Katharina Geis & Sarah Ulrich will give insights into the empirical studies and present the research results.
The exhibition of the research project “Viral Theatres” explores this question and makes its Living Archive accessible – a multifaceted collection that shows the new forms and themes of pandemic theater making and experience in interviews, video and audio documents and digital interactions.
The opening of the exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium with workshops, a VR performance, and discussion panels on the future of hybrid theater work with international cultural practitioners and scholars.
Symposium
28. – 30. April 2022
Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin & Streaming
Exhibition
28. April – 3. June 2022
Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin
Philippstr. 13, Campus Nord, Haus 3, 10115 Berlin
Opening hours: Mo – Fri, 14:00 -18:00
The next colloquium will take place on 25 April 2022 at 2 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited! The event will be held virtually.
Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.
The Museum as a Choir: Visitor Reactions to the Multivocality at the Humboldt Forum’s ‘Berlin Global’
This talk by Irene Hilden & Andrei Zavadski will provide insights into the research project ‘Realizations and Reception in the Humboldt Forum,’ based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
With ethnographic audience research at its root, the project explored how visitors engaged with the Humboldt Forum and its exhibitions during the first weeks of the institution’s operation. The talk will focus on some of the findings related to audience experiences of multivocality as employed in the exhibition ‘Berlin Global.’
The lecture will be held in English.
Zentralinstitut der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
